By Conrad Black
There is room for real concern in the agitation to disseminate do-it-yourself sex assault kits, the latest front in what militant feminists hold to be a righteous counterattack on male sexual predation, and many men regard as an escalation of the arch-feminists’ campaign to emasculate and terrify Canadian men. There is now a widely supported proposal to make these kits, which facilitate taking DNA samples from relevant places in the female anatomy that can be used to strengthen allegations of sexual assault and packaging them at home by aggrieved sexual assault complainants.
The alleged basis of this demand is that not all or even most hospitals are fully equipped to administer such tests and therefore the purported victim should be free to do so herself. I naturally have to defer to medical specialists in this field on how accurate such self-administered tests would be, given the implicit liberty conferred in timing and arrangement of the evidence. It is not clear how these concerns could be monitored or validated by general rules, and the concept of women cranking up to lay very serious criminal charges against an alleged assailant being able to prepare the evidence themselves must incite some concern about where this is leading.
No well-adjusted person is in favor of sexual assault or the toleration of coercion of sexual activity. For notorious reasons, the sometimes stigmatizing nature of making public allegations of that offense, as well as the difficulty of producing a conclusive judgment from conflicting testimony have been exploited to allow a great deal of sexual misconduct, undoubtedly including frequent incidences of outright rape, to go legally unchallenged.
There has been an immense amount of controversy over many years about the level of credence to be attached to allegations, sometimes from women who had been silent for decades, of sexual misconduct against men. All history is replete with notorious instances of the chronic injustices that arise when mere denunciation determines a criminal case. It is a hallmark of totalitarian and other lawless regimes that unverifiable information imputing criminal behavior to others is often taken as dispositive of the case and leads to the imposition of severe penalties, when the objective level of proof falls far short of the traditional requirement to be beyond a reasonable doubt.
It was 40 years ago that my wife of the last 34 years, Barbara Amiel, wrote that we were closing in on the point where men against whom challenges of sexual aggression had been laid would be advised by postcard of the date and address of the prison to which they should report. Once the balance of proof was tilted to give enhanced weight to uncorroborated claims by women, often many years after the alleged fact, effective defences became very difficult. I don’t doubt that a great many acts of sexual assault by males went unchallenged in the earlier era of difficulty of proving a case even if evidence was collected immediately after the alleged offence, if the accused man’s argument was plausible.
All civilized people want to discourage sexual coercion of women and much more fervently of underaged girls and boys. But this era of giving increased weight to the evidence of complainants, especially retroactively, has many hazards. The late Joseph Bernardin, Archbishop of Chicago was haunted for years by an allegation of abusing his office at the expense of a young seminarian, and while he was not charged and continued in his functions, he was hideously defamed until the plaintiff, after two years, acknowledged that his recollection was elicited under hypnosis, and he acknowledged the cardinal’s complete innocence. Even more outrageous was the temporarily successful prosecution of George Cardinal Pell, prefect of the Vatican Secretariat of the economy and prior to that, archbishop of Melbourne and then of Sydney, Australia. He was convicted of child sexual abuse and served 14 months in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, but the convictions were quashed and he was acquitted by the High Court of Australia and also in a separate canonical investigation by the Holy See’s congregation for the doctrine of the faith. Two years after his death in 2023 at the age of 81 there was an unadjudicated claim against him of abuse of boys more than 50 years before. In all of the circumstances, including a complete lack of any evidence, this claim is generally not credited but Pell was put through a terrible purgatory.
Many readers will recall controversy over the confirmation of the nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. As the matter came before the Senate Judiciary committee for confirmation (or otherwise) a well spoken woman, Christine Blasey Ford, emerged from the undergrowth of over 35 years and claimed that while intoxicated and in a year of which she was not certain and a place that she did not claim to remember, a young man fell upon her while both were fully clad, on a bed and that it was Kavanaugh. Nothing further was alleged; there were no witnesses and the only people who claimed to have any recollection of the occasion disagreed with her account and helped to exonerate the judge who was confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court by a paper-thin margin. This was an utterly absurd proceeding that should never got as far as it did.
Bill Cosby, a very talented and well-liked man and his life was almost destroyed by a sequence of more than thirty allegations of sexual misconduct with women, most of them from decades before, though one recent charge was temporarily upheld and Cosby was imprisoned for three years, but the charge was overturned on appeal. He settled some civil cases but is officially innocent of a host of charges, but 25 honorary university degrees given him have been rescinded.
I’m not going to go to bat for Jeffrey Epstein whom I knew but only as a business acquaintance with whom I had lunch a couple times and as an advisor to one of our directors. But he has not actually been convicted of the grievous crimes it is generally assumed that he committed. While my friend of many years ago Ghislaine Maxwell has been convicted, I don’t believe that a Canadian or British court would have accepted, as the U.S. jurisdiction did, that the prosecution had the right to take money from the Epstein estate with no evidence that it had been improperly accumulated, and use it to incentivize four complainants to come forth and claim that Maxwell had assisted the deceased Epstein in the commission of sexual offenses against them when they were underage.
I absolutely want sexual offenders to be convicted and those offences to be deterred. But we cannot get into a regime of outright denunciation and still claim to be a society of laws, and the concept of women going home and administering a sexual assault test to themselves and claiming it is probative evidence for severe criminal charges is a disquieting concept. I would rather permit women to arm themselves with mace and other nonlethal deterrents, than continue to tilt the scales of justice more steeply in favour of the accusers. Sexual assault is a very serious problem that will not be solved by unjust criminal procedures.
First published in the National Post
